Thursday, May 26, 2011

Backstory: "The Pride of Guillermo"

Sometimes, you just want to stand convention on its ear.

Superspies/secret agents are "stock characters" that usually seem to follow the trail blazed by James Bond: Suave, sophisticated, confident, and armed to the teeth with all sorts of high-tech weaponry that can masquerade as ordinary objects.  That image of secret agents is what I wanted to shake up in "The Pride of Guillermo."  I wanted to come up with a character--Kirk Ransom--who was green, wasn't considered to be the top of his field by his superiors, who made mistakes, and who had to rely on his own wits rather than a bunch of gadgets to escape danger.  Creating a character who was so unlike James Bond was a lot of fun for me as a writer.  Another story using the Kirk Ransom character, "Bring Out Your Dead," can be found on Residential Aliens by clicking this link: http://www.resaliens.com/2010/04/bring-out-your-dead/#more-708

As the title suggests, I also wanted to deal with the issue of pride.  The Bible is loaded with warnings against letting our pride get the better of us.  Proverbs 16:18 says, "Pride goes before destruction,And a haughty spirit before stumbling."  Both James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5 tells us that "God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble" (New American Standard).  In crafting the character of Emil Guillermo, I wanted a bad guy whose pride would...well, if you haven't read the story, I won't spoil it for you.

The mutated, amphibious sharks were inspired by an old episode of the original Outer Limits entitled "Tourist Attraction."  As I may have mentioned before, sometimes I get a lot of inspiration from classic shows like that and The Twilight Zone.



Philippians 4:13.--SMS

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